The Best Digital Marketing Strategies for the Automotive Industry
Vehicle shopping has evolved from the good ol’ pitch in the dealership parking lot. Buyers today take a much more active role in the process. Your marketing strategies have to cater to that.
Have a user-friendly website
Your official website will be the primary point of connection with your customers in the early stages of their purchase process. Even if they discover your business from social media, your site is where the majority of browsing and price checking happens.
Therefore, you want to make it as pleasant of a user experience as possible. It has to be conducive to efficient research and smooth shopping. Here’s what you need to provide:
Convenience. Customers would prefer to have everything in one place, neatly organized, and easy to access. Your website needs to include valuable content, relevant information, and attractive visuals. Pages have to load quickly and the whole site must be intuitively organized and easy to navigate.
Powerful research tools. Potential buyers will hate your business if you shove offers in their face. Let them research their purchase at their own pace. Provide them with accurate comparison tools, price calculators, payment schedule projectors, etc.
Thorough product pages. The more valuable information you provide, the more you come across as a reliable expert. List the highlights of each vehicle’s features and provide detailed specifics. Add high-quality photos from multiple views.
Include in-depth vehicle reviews, too. Maintain a balance between praise and criticism. You might hesitate to publicize less than stellar opinions of your product, but you have to get over that reluctance.
Remember: if the customer sees nothing but rave reviews, you will seem too good to be true. They’ll conclude that you are untrustworthy, they will navigate away, and possibly even tell others to skip your business.
Branch out into adjacent niches
The modern shopper heavily researches products and services online before they commit their money. As such, in order to reach potential customers, you have to make sure that your business can be found anywhere on the Internet where people search for vehicles or anything related.
People who look for a water spot remover or a windshield repair kit will definitely notice your own advertisement, because they’re already actively thinking about vehicle maintenance. Even if they don’t buy anything on the spot, your business will stay in the back of their mind.
Of course, you want to keep these people on your website. You want to prevent them from looking into many other providers. The way to achieve that is to have a strong presence in their shopping spaces. These spaces include major search engines, as well as vehicle-related aggregate sites, manufacturers’ websites, and the websites of your local dealerships.
All this is to say, hunt for potential traffic (pun intended) everywhere you can. There’s no guarantee that any given click will convert into a purchase, so you want to expand your reach to raise your chances.
Optimize your pages for mobile
Most shoppers today browse from their phones, or even switch between devices while researching products. If your site is not mobile-friendly, buyers will leave it in an average of three seconds.
Remember: sites that look good on mobile will look fine in-browser too, but not the other way around. Prioritize scaling for the mobile experience. This includes smartphones, tablets, and any other device you can think of.
In particular, focus on navigation and loading speed. Cumbersome pages that take a while are repulsive to the fast-paced virtual market. You have to be prepared to engage people across multiple channels. Otherwise, you will be costing yourself the majority of the shopper pool.
Kickstart interest with paid advertisement
You probably already have a content marketing strategy in place, but sometimes you can’t wait for it to yield results. When you need to generate interest quickly, invest in some paid ads on platforms like Google or Facebook rather than marketing myopia concept.
These ads take up little space, but strongly compel people to action. With them, reach is guaranteed. All you have to do is effectively design your ad and target your specific audience, and you can obtain drastically more leads.
Ad design includes things like layout, visuals, headlines, and how you phrase your call to action. Track the ad results with market analysis tools that most advert services include.
Enlist satisfied customers
Positive customer feedback is immensely powerful leverage. Most buyers rely heavily on reviews and recommendations, so you want to ensure good virtual word-of-mouth. It plays an even larger part than ads or salespeople’s talk.
Take a systematic approach and ask happy customers to leave a review. Prompt them soon after their visit. Keep an eye on unprompted reviews too. Proactively deal with negative ones. Timely and well-managed responses build your reputation just as much as five-star feedback.
Most vehicle shoppers today do all their product browsing online. By the time they reach your dealership, they’ve more or less made their decision. Optimize your digital marketing strategies to achieve the most impact in that critical research stage and keep your conversions high.